


Burgers and Terrible Pick-Up Lines

by Bekkoni



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League, Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Awkwardness, First Dates, M/M, SuperBat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:04:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1592624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bekkoni/pseuds/Bekkoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce asks Clark out. Sort of. He tries, at least. And isn't it the effort that counts?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burgers and Terrible Pick-Up Lines

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by a post on Buckingham Alice's Tumblr.

This was a bad idea. This was a very, very bad idea. Bruce watched Clark over the top of the menu, as he obliviously picking out what variation on a burger and fries he wanted. This was one of Clark’s favorite restaurants, a little hole-in-the-wall burger place that Bruce was pretty sure only got through its health department inspections because it catered mostly to Metropolis PD. But if he was going to ask Clark out, he wanted to put him in a good mood first.

So greasy burgers it was.

Clark hummed along to the Elvis song playing on the jukebox. If it were anyone else, Bruce would have been grinding his teeth by this point, but in Clark he found it endearing. He’d only planned things out up to this point. He had no idea how he was actually going to go from _Hey, Clark, want to get lunch today?_ to _And by the way, maybe want to go out on a date sometime_? He'd long ago discovered that one of Clark's superpowers was flustering him, and he was half-sure he was going to mess up anything he tried to say. 

The only line that popped into his head was, _Are you sure you’re not from Tennessee?  Because you’re the only ten I see._

He mentally winced and promised himself he would stop spending so much time with Wally.

“So what’s up?” Clark looked at him expectantly. Apparently, he’d already decided on food. Bruce hadn’t even read the menu yet, and the waitress (decked out in a polyester Halloween-costume version of a 50’s soda fountain girl) was approaching. He had no idea what to order, or what to say to Clark, and so ended up just staring at him like an idiot.

Clark looked back down at his menu, almost ashamedly. “I know what this is about." 

“You _do_?” His heart stopped in his chest. Clark wasn’t smiling anymore. His expression was quite dour, in fact. Bruce fiddled with the wrapper on his straw so he had something to do with his hands, and tried to keep his face neutral. So Clark knew that Bruce was about to ask him out, and didn’t feel the same way. That was all right. Bruce had certainly dealt with worse things than romantic rejection before. Maybe if he played it cool they could laugh it off, and Clark would go back to being friendly without them missing a beat. 

Clark took a deep breath, and spread out his hands on the table, like he was about to break bad news. Bruce’s hands clenched. “I’m sorry I let Wally use the Javelin without your permission, and helped him cover it up when he crashed it. I’ll help you build a new one.”

Bruce’s heart resumed its normal activity. “You two broke the Javelin?”

“You didn’t know?”

Bruce pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering how he had ever thought this would work. “If I were angry with you, we wouldn’t be in this shithole restaurant.”

Clark rolled his eyes. “I _like_ this restaurant.”

“Exactly, Clark!” Bruce waved his hands at the menu. “If I’d picked a restaurant based on what would please _me_ , we wouldn’t be somewhere that calls French fries a vegetable.”

The waitress glanced at them and backed away, probably deciding she could wait a little longer to take their order.

Clark sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Then what’s this about?”

Bruce closed his eyes for just a moment and decided it was best to rip the band-aid off quickly. “I was wondering if you would like to go to dinner.”

“You asked me to lunch to ask me to dinner?” Now Clark just looked confused. His left eye squinted a bit, the way he did when he was deciding whether someone was just being odd or if there was something more nefarious going on. Bruce kicked himself for finding it adorable. _So_ not the time.

“Not the meal itself,” he said, like that cleared things up. “You know…dinner.”

Clark squinted harder.

Bruce wondered why he had to be in love with someone who was so infuriatingly dense at times. “Dinner. Like…” he paused to unclench his jaw “…a date.”

Clark’s face went blank, and Bruce started planning out the least embarrassing and fastest exit plan. Breaking a window was probably not appropriate, unfortunately. Then Clark grinned like he was a little kid who’d just been told that Christmas was tomorrow. “Yes. Yes! But--I thought you weren’t interested.”

Now Bruce was the one squinting. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I came over a couple of weeks ago, you didn’t seem interested at all.”

 _A couple of weeks ago_? Bruce tried to figure out what the hell Clark was talking about. “You mean when you showed up in Gotham and followed me around on patrol? That was supposed to be a date?”

“I brought pizza.”

“Pizza does not mean it’s a date. Pizza is barely even food.”

Clark shook his head in mock sadness. “If we’re going to start dating, you’re going to have to learn to not denigrate the food of my American heritage.”

“Burgers and pizza are nobody’s heritage, Clark." 

Clark sighed like he was imminently disappointed, but his eyes glinted. “There you go again.”

Bruce pointed to the menu. “If I order a hamburger and fries, will that make you happy?” 

Clark smiled again. “Why, I could kiss you.” Then, dropping his voice to a sultry bedroom voice that Bruce had not even known he possessed, he added, “Right here, even.”

Bruce blinked in shock, and then quickly raised the menu so that Clark wouldn’t see him blush. On the other side of the table, Clark started chuckling. Damn x-ray vision. Well, Clark would pay for that later. He already had plenty of ideas as to how.


End file.
